Breakthrough Cohort Feature: CourseStorm

CourseStorm, co-founded by Brian Rahill & Matt James, provides simple online registration and marketing software for education providers to publish their class catalog online, process registrations, and spread the word about their offerings. “CourseStorm has huge growth potential, especially given that the need for informal education isn’t going away. We anticipate that they will continue to explode as things like those involved in the gig economy continue to share their expertise,” said Accelerator Partner Jean Hammond.

Key Success Metrics

Have 125K student accounts in all 50 states

Have signed up course providers in 37 states

Processed over $7.5M in transactions

The following is the transcript from a conversation with Brian Rahill, Co-founder & CEO of CourseStorm.

Why did you found your company? I’m a father of four and was always looking for summer and afterschool educational opportunities for my kids. Programs were hard to find and impossible to register for. It all felt like this incredibly clunky system. Not only was it frustrating as a parent, but I also realized that increasingly, parents and adults are looking at education that is outside of schools. It’s no longer ‘you spend 12 years in the K-12 system, you do your 4 years in college, and you’re done.’ People are learning all the time. That was the critical thing, realizing that schools don’t have a monopoly on knowledge.

Most memorable moment on your entrepreneurship journey? One of the most memorable moments was when I essentially fired myself as the CEO of a company that I had started 16 years ago, so that I could fully pursue CourseStorm. I realized the potential with CourseStorm was just tremendous, so giving that up and fulling stepping up to this next opportunity was memorable, exciting and scary at the same time.

Biggest challenge to date? One of the reasons we do startups is because there are challenges all the time and it seems like as soon as you nail down one, it’s the next biggest challenge. So more importantly, I think, what’s our biggest challenge right now? And that’s building a team. We have our funding in place, so now we are focused on creating a team that understands our vision and is committed to working like mad to see it through.

Why LearnLaunch? It’s easy to be positive about LearnLaunch. I think there are two reasons for us to be here at the stage we’re at. Both are about the connections.

It’s the connections to the other entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship can be kind of lonely. So, being here in the space around other CEO’s that are all struggling with similar problems is incredibly helpful and inspiring.

I think the other thing is the mentor and advisor network. It’s finding people that could serve on our board or be key advisors to us. The fact that they know technology and they know the education space means we can shortcut the background and get right to discussing things that will make an impact to our business.

Look forward to a year from now, what are some of your biggest successes in ‘17? The first is revenue-based. We’re going to double revenue this year. We are excited about that. We’ll also have built out a solid team. We’re looking to add about 4 people this year. So it will be a tight team but a group that can really get some work done.

Want to get in touch with Brian? Send him an email: brian@coursestorm.com